
I first read about the 10-foot Terror Bird of South America in a National Geographic magazine at my friend's house sometime last month.
"Imagine an ostrich with larger, more powerful legs and neck, armed with massive claws," said Herculano Alvarenga, a terror-bird expert at the Museu de História Natural in Sao Paolo, Brazil.
"An ostrich, the largest living bird, can swallow an apple. But a phorusrhacid could swallow a medium-sized dog in one gulp," Alvarenga said.
Gulp. Indeed.
Today on NG's website, I came upon the recently discovered 16-foot Gigantoraptor of China.
Gigantoraptor erlianensis, which lived some 70 million years ago, is the largest toothless dinosaur known to date and possibly the biggest feathered animal ever to have lived, according to a team led by Xing Xu from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, China.
So, Terror Bird is just that--a bird. Gigantoraptor is a birdlike dinosaur--I suppose because it has arms, too, and not only legs.
I wonder how Adam and Eve liked living with them.
1 comment:
dude, have you seen the archaeoptrix on david attenborough/bbc's life of birds? totally amazing.
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